Many of the existing internet-based transportation-related sites are simply bulletin boards for posting freight transportation supply and demand and do not provide many of services and capabilities needed by the buyers and sellers of freight transportation services, such as allowing the execution of tender agreements, matching the needs of the buyers with the capabilities of the sellers, providing automated tendering and payment processes and providing mechanisms for dealing with unexpected events and resolving disputes.
For instance, the traditional internet-based transportation-related sites do not allow buyers and seller to execute their transactions over a network. Instead, buyers and sellers must contact each other off-line in order to transact with each other. Additionally, many do not provide any way to match the loads a buyers need to transport with the capacities sellers have to offer. Another important shortcoming of tradition internet-based transportation-related sites is that they provide no way of tracking and tracing shipments while they are en-route, particularly when transportation is provided by multiple carriers and across multiple modes of transportation. In fact, most traditional sites do not facilitate multi-modal transactions at all.